Last month, Republicans put your internet privacy on the chopping block and on Monday, Trump dropped the axe on it. That seems like not a small thing to do, but then the U.S. bombed Syria and now that everyone is muttering “nuclear war” between panic attacks at work and contacting stress ulcers the size Trump’s head. If you are able to stop hyperventilating, you might want to tune into the latest episode of Big Time Dicks, in which Joanna and I explain (in layman’s terms) about what the repeal of internet privacy means for you and happens to your data once it’s out of your control.
In October, the FCC passed a regulation that would not allow companies to collect sensitive data, like browsing histories and location information, without an individual’s permission. The protections were supposed to go in place in December of this year. However, on Monday, Trump signed a resolution that repealed them, ensuring that telecom companies now have unfettered access to sensitive information about you—including financial data, health information, your browsing history, app usage, and location—and can sell it to other companies and agencies.
For example, a 2013 study by Harvard’s Data Privacy Lab found that Google searches for black names are more likely to show ads for arrest records than for white names, regardless of whether that individual has an arrest record or not. Or consider that in 2016, ProPublica found that post-conviction risk assessment tools—which try to predict likelihood of recidivism of an individual and are used to set bond amounts and release dates for prisoners—were accurate in predicting violent crime only 20 percent of the time and were twice as likely to incorrectly label a black defendant as a repeat criminal than a white defendant. Conversely, they were more likely to mislabel white defendants as low risk than black defendants. “There’s a great potential for harm that may only just end up reinforcing some discriminatory and predatory practices that we’ve seen offline,” said Renderos.
“The fact is, this data can end up in places we never expected them to end up in,” he continued. “Whether that’s a police database that’s using predictive policing to identify places where crime might happen, or whether that’s a bank lender who’s determining whether or not to give you a loan—that’s the unfortunate wild, wild, west world that we’re living in in terms of our online privacy. What Congress did was extremely harmful and affects everyone in the United States who uses the internet.”
0 Comments